Capricious
by bright snow
Summary: And maybe it is not so easy to navigate the forest between good and evil, and maybe it is easier to just follow the known path back. They are both only human, after all. A series of unrelated ficlets exploring all concepts of Jinx and KF. Some Flinx.
1. From Makeup to Ruin

**Capricious**

**From Makeup to Ruin**

_A/N: Post Lightspeed; questionable Flinx. Watch for language._

_Disclaimer: Don't own Teen Titans. Especially whoever Linda Parks is._

...

She is sitting on a park bench—alone—idly kicking a fat duck with her boots, and suddenly, he is sitting there with her, draping himself casually all over the bench, as if she had left that space empty just for him.

"Hey, Jinx."

"What." She spares him nothing but an annoyed roll of the eyes (because she sure as hell is not going to back down, even if he's way _way_ too close and it makes her heart jolt—in surprise, not teenage high school love—and _goddammit has he not heard of personal space_).

"Can't I just say hi?" he grins, charmingly. She scuffs some dirt at the duck, who had wisely strayed outside her comfortable kicking range. He raises his eyebrows but remains planted on the bench.

After a moment (a long, long moment in his eyes), he turns to her, abruptly. "Your eyelashes—" he leans in close, too close, brings his blue blue ocean eyes within inches of her face "—aren't pink, you know?"

She snorts and flicks a hex at him, smirking when he can't dodge in time (because even if he _can_ vibrate his freaking molecules, _no one_ can dodge a quick-fired hex from _two inches away_). "Of course not, _idiot_."

He jerks back, unhappily rubbing at the sudden and inexplicable charley horse cramping in his left calf. "But aren't people's eyelashes the same color as their hair?"

She makes another derisive noise and absently directs a spark of bad luck at the duck now preoccupied with gobbling bread, a sardonically cat-like expression forming at the bird's expense (Kid Flash frowns at this, but he's too busy massaging his leg to do much else). "What, you think they make pink mascara?" And it turns out there _is_ pink mascara out there, but Jinx had already gone through her little phase of plundering every dress store and hair salon and punk rock store and pharmacy and convenience store and big box store on both this _and_ that side of town, and had concluded that no such pink mascara existed in Jump City that did not clump stupidly, apply runnily, flake like Mammoth's dandruff, smudge within one hour of even _light_ criminal activity, or—worst of all—looked _tacky_.

So she sticks with black. Preferably waterproof. And now that she was actually...buying...her makeup (as opposed to swiping it off the shelves, which had been so much easier and required no dipping into her steadily shrinking savings), her preferred brand was Maybelle, which was hailed in a recent issue of _Trend_ she'd casually thumbed through as she waited in line as both economically friendly and cherished by professionals.

It matches better, anyway. She'd get pink top-heavy if she'd found any decent pink mascara in the first place. Stupid pink eyes. Stupid pink hair.

He struggles for a bit, but quickly concedes to his ignorance and impatient curiosity. "What's, uh. Mass-care-ah? Some kind of...relief program?" _That turns your eyelashes different colors?_ he silently adds.

She whips her head to him in shock before she could feign snarky disinterest. "What? You don't know what _mascara_ is? _You?_"

He leans back, somewhat bewildered. "Well, no?"

She blinks and realizes she's enjoying his company, so she reclines nonchalantly back on the park bench, spitefully aiming another hex at a piece of bread the stupid fat duck was after. The bread now keeps rolling just out of reach of the bird, and she confidently reattaches her aloofly malicious grin.

"Well, I figured since it's _you_," she begins airily, "and since you're so into _pretty girls_ like Raven and Argent and the Amazons and _random girls in bikinis_, I just figured you'd know _all about_ mascara."

He edges a little away on the park bench, smiling nervously. "Hey, wait, is this about The Great Race thing with Más and Menos? Cause I thought we were good on that—"

"That race thing you _lost_, you mean?" she cuts him off, eyes glinting bright pink, still coolly staring at the duck's struggles. A razor-thin wave flashes out, and the duck finds himself molting early (and just after he finally got his bread, too!). He opens his mouth to snap back an irritated _no thanks to you_, or a _hey now, you're not being fair, Jinx_, but is saved from certain doom by self-preservation instincts and closes his mouth again. Faster reflexes than normal humans—and most metahumans—do come in handy once in a while. He begins to speak again, but Jinx keeps going. "And let's not forget _Linda Park_, right?"

This time he freezes.

This time, even though it's a balmy 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and even though he's never, ever cold thanks to his crazy metabolism, and even though they had been on almost cordial terms with each other just two minutes ago and he'd dared to let himself be a little hopeful, and even though he'd taken on running past lasers and bombs without breaking a sweat, he feels a chill run through him.

He freezes, and he knows she sees it (even if it is only just a split of a split of a second, and even if she isn't even looking directly at him).

"Where did you hear about Linda?" he says quietly. And the moment it leaves his mouth, he knows it's the wrong thing to say, because all of a sudden Jinx's face is blanker than a prison cell's stone wall, and it feels like he's sitting next to a charged thundercloud, and the naked duck is now barfing up all the bread he just stuffed down his gullet.

And because Jinx had been _the_ top student during her time at the HIVE, she'd not only passed _all_ her classes with class and flair, but had gotten particularly impressive marks in Deception 101, was given Honors for her work in Deception 212, and had even taken all sorts of supplementary courses and did intensive self-study on that same topic when the school ran out of courses for her to take; all just because she liked the feeling of trickery. In other words, Jinx was a goddamn queen at manipulation, and because Kid Flash was more obvious than See-More when he's using the _wrong_ kind of eyeball, she says "She's a fucking_reporter_, you know," and leaves it at that, not mentioning how she'd hacked the internet for hours (and made Gizmo help her, too), obsessively, and told both herself and her team that finding every little thing about him and his background was for the purpose of _bloody crushing that cocky mess of red and yellow_. It hadn't been—at all—because _that woman_ had been stupid enough to leak out _her_ relationship with _him_ through any sort of media someone of _her_ career might be connected to, but Jinx wasn't about to let him know that.

And then there is silence, and she finally slides her cat eyes over to look, and she tells herself that expression of worry and betrayal and hate and surprise flashing across his face is the best kind, and that it's better than any kind of mystery flower in a vase from a mystery red and yellow deliveryman left at her feet.

And Jinx smiles, crazily, and digs out her newly-bought mascara bottle and tosses at his thinking-at-ten-to-the-30th-power-synapses-a-second face, charging it with a nasty hex just as it leaves her fingertips. "Go save her, Hero," she mocks (and he has all her attention now, all he foolishly thought he'd ever want for today), her Cheshire grin growing even wider as her makeup explodes an inky jet all over his unmoving form. "Go save her, huh?"

And when he launches off that bench to Keystone City and leaves behind a tangled mess of crumbled and melted plastic and two three-foot-diameter craters, Jinx just flips a perfect turn in the air, _off off and away_, and laughs, laughs her maniacal more-than-just-half-mad laugh (because Kid Flash may be stupid and naïve and too trustful and hopelessly idealistic and can run at the fucking speed of light, but he is still human, and even he gets touchy on the subject of someone he _maypossiblykindof_ have feelings for getting _maybeevenatinybitinjuredatall_).

And she leaves to go steal herself some new mascara, and on her way out the park, she kicks that duck into the pond and laughs as it drowns.

...

_End._


	2. Everything She has Always Hated

**Capricious**

**Everything She has Always Hated**

_A/N: I've decided to make _Capricious_ a collection of all things related to Jinx—beautiful, wonderful, slightly-more-than-a-little-unhinged Jinx. Chapters aren't connected unless otherwise indicated. __Please enjoy!_

_Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans. If I did, there would be more than a measly five seasons of it. ):_

... ...

For as far back as Jinx can remember, she's always seen the world through a yellow, souring bruise.

It's nothing serious, really, just the kind of stain that fades in and out of her vision on a whim's notice, and all it is is a brief discoloration of what she would otherwise see, and she is long used to disregarding it. The only thing abnormal about her abnormality–ha, an abnormality even among the abnormalness of abnormal metahumans–is her conclusion that the yellowing splotches appear in greater quantity when she is under more stress. A worthless conclusion, really, because naturally any weaknesses in the body become more pronounced under higher amounts of stress.

Was this condition a result of malnutrition in her diet? Developing brain tumors? A side effect of her cursed, ill-natured powers, or perhaps because of all the ridiculous red-eye-glowing Brother Blood seemed fond of employing at the Hive? The reason for her affliction is anyone's guess, and quite frankly, Jinx doesn't particularly care about the how's or why's. She has long accepted that her vision will never be _normal_–hell, nothing about her ever could be–and doesn't even bother with attempting to discuss the condition with anyone, least of all her (former) teammates or classmates. It is something that could be used as leverage in a back-stabbing move, no matter how little it actually interferes with her life, and besides, Jinx doubts that the only possible connection of the bruising of her vision to the whole glowing bloodshot eye thing is an amplification of an instability of what was already there before. Because in the end, anyway, she has been the longest student of Brother Blood's, the longest under his infrequent controls and commands, having been abandoned–sold–by her birth parents to him as his very first disciple, and the effects of mind control should be the most heavily felt by her.

So it doesn't matter to her, not really, of being subject to the yellow bruising of her world. The only real disadvantage of this maybe sickness is that as a result, she has come to _abhor_ anything the color yellow to a terrifying degree, anything that dares to _stay_ yellow even when the bruising fades out. It is not a rational hate by any means, she knows, and she knows its stupidity and how her absurd rage has cost her more than once (the incident with the hot dog stand displaying just a little _too_ much mustard on its products and her subsequent failure in completing the role Jinx herself had assigned in robbing a nearby bank, for instance, comes to mind), but she can't help it. She hates yellow, because yellow and all it stands for is a reminder of what she isn't, of what she can never have—never be—and, most importantly of all, it reminds her of the multitude of greypurplebluegreen bruises ever suffered on her skin, bruises that eventually fade into the same detested yellow that plagues her world. Yellow represents all of her slinking away from lost battles, of being able to only lick her wounds in the settling dust, of having to learn all over again in the grimy darkness of the city's putrid underbelly just how far from perfect—successful—adequate she is, and so she cannot stand the sight of yellow.

This is, perhaps, why Jinx had never felt comfortable in the Academy with its honeycomb walls, or with the Hive Five, whose name drew itself from the school's decorations. Her senses, too, were possibly warning her in advance about Bumblebee's true, traitorous (well—look who's talking about "traitorous"), allegiance, and why she had never liked her; or perhaps, maybe, it had been warning her on her gold heists that being around all that yellow could only end in shameful failure at the hands of good-two-shoes heroes. It is what she likes to think, that perhaps the occasional yellowing of her vision and her subsequent hatred of it may aid her when it condescends to, because it is the only way to cope with such a debilitating stupidity rivaling the profound lack of intelligence in Mammoth's dandruffy skull. So this is what she tells herself.

It is little surprise that of all the yellow things she hates, she hates Kid Flash the most. Common sense would dictate her most reviled Teen Titan to be Robin, since he is the figurehead of all manners of crime-stopping (and life-ruining, but again, maybe that is only a thing heroes clothed in the colors of ketchup and mustard partake in), but in reality, fuck you, common sense, because even Robin in his fashion disaster traffic light ensemble doesn't even come close to the supreme loathing Jinx reserves just for Kid Flash.

It is the ultimate testament to her entirely unbiased, justifiable wrath that he thinks he can accost her in the street while she is walking home from a totally legitimate and totally therapeutic—at least until he decided to show his ugly mug—shopping. She hates him enough as he is, a mess of unflattering yellow spandex clinging to his jagged chicken bones and scrawny chicken muscles, and the recent desertion of the Hive Five does little to sweeten her mood, so Jinx opens her mouth to tell him exactly what she thinks of him and his idiot meddling, but before she can begin, he is gone again, the afterimage of his wide, self-satisfied smile the only proof he had ever stopped by.

Well. That's what she thinks. It isn't until she's fumbling to open her dingy apartment door while juggling three reusable cloth bags (because one of the few things Jinx doesn't hate is the earth, even if yellow things grow on it, so she tries to leave as little impact upon her only real mother as possible) that she notices the obnoxious bouquet of large-headed sunflowers freshly tucked in with her breads and savory desserts. With all her hands occupied, all she can really do is throw her head back in a feral scream, clamp her teeth down on the dying collection of flowers, and whip the bruising yellow reminder over the balcony rail before crashing through her door like a diseased rhinoceros, huddling into the relative safety of her dark, cockroach-ridden apartment.

Of course, such a display doesn't stop the King of Yellow, and the next day, Jinx awakes to find a fucking _yellow_ Post-It note neatly stuck onto the _goddamn inside_ of her front and only door. There is a surprising amount of handwritten text packed onto such a small scrap of paper, but at the moment, she can't quite find it in herself to even grudgingly acknowledge such ability because _how dare he, how dare he, how fucking dare he_ know about one of the most closely-held secrets of hers that she has never told a single soul, and _what right does he think he goddamn has_ in offering his useless opinion on it?

So Jinx promptly launches a hex-powered punch, making contact square on the little square of offending yellow, watching with giddy satisfaction when the entire door explodes outwards in a detonation of five million splinters, a splinter for each of the faded bruises no one else but she remembers.

"_Leave me the goddamn fuck alone!_" she screams into a sea of bewildered faces, knowing he is hiding somewhere nearby to gauge her reaction like the goddamn stalker he is, before retreating back inside to calmly gather her possessions and unconcernedly crushing the remains of what used to be the door beneath her reinforced combat boots on her way out.

It's past time to find somewhere else to live. He'll find her eventually, she knows, he'll find her as long as she stays in his city, but someday—someday, Jinx dreams of the day she can accumulate enough money to disappear from this godforsaken place, the old stomping grounds of Condiment Boy and the remaining members of the Hive Five, to disappear to somewhere quiet enough that she can hear herself think and not be pestered to "reform" every time she tried to breathe.

This is the only dream she can aspire to, now, ever since that red and yellow string bean ruined everything she had by making her question herself and her way of life; and so, she'll pursue it with single-minded determination.

...

Miraculously, the Post-It is still perfectly in-tact, albeit a bit crumpled and worse for the wear, but the important thing is that it is mostly unharmed. A spandex-clad figure crouches and picks it gently out of the wreckage, standing for a moment in quiet contemplation, then speeds out of sight before the cops come.

...

_"Try seeing the world in gold-colored glasses."_

... ...

_End._


	3. Like a Diseased Rhinoceros

**Capricious **

**Like a Diseased Rhinoceros**

_A/N: Set post-Lightspeed; Jinx and Kid Flash are on considerably better terms with each other here (so, less drama, less foul language. Yay!). This chapter's more of a K-plus rating than a T._

_Also, a super big thank you to the reviewers! It really enourages me to continue writing, and to work to continue improving. :)_

_Disclaimer: All I own is the astoundingly trance-like experience of picking apart ingrown hairs. I just can't stop..._

...

Jinx refuses to shave her legs.

Or rather, perhaps it'd be more accurate to say that she refuses to let edged blades anywhere at all near her vicinity if she can help it, and that definitely, totally encompasses shaving off any sort of hair on her person with a razor. Some necessary evils like scissors are things she can put up with if the blades are rubberbanded together, but regarding razors, she's completely and entirely convinced herself to shun them. In fact, she doesn't even voluntarily handle razors that are (supposedly!) safely ensconced in stores' hard plastic wrappings.

Surprisingly enough, her fear of razors, is, as phobias and fears go, incredibly rational, something that seems wholly at odds with the majority of other aspects of her personality. "One wrong nick and I could cut myself up," Jinx once replies sourly at Kid Flash's gentle and (stupidly) sincere prompting, and thankfully, he instantly understands that the type of cutting up she's referring to can't be fixed with a band-aid and a kiss. After all, her style of fighting, her way of life, depends so much—too much—on the precise fitness of her every body part, of flipping and turning and dizzying acrobatics at a moment's notice, and she cannot risk even something as small as a razor nick on her palm if that is all it takes to make a normally thoughtless transitional handstand into her arm buckling under her.

It is truly unfortunate, then, that bad luck tends to siphon towards her very being, like how marbles cannot help but be drawn to the vortex of a bowling ball on a cushion or how the planets are drawn to the sun, and if Jinx forgets for just a second to aggressively suck the unluckiness into her soul's Bad Luck Reserve, paper cuts galore in the next minute is the most optimistic thing she can hope for.

So, Jinx does not shave her legs. It is one of the very few things she herself can actively control to minimize (or at least decrease) the amount of injuries on her body, and Jinx will take all she can get.

This is not to say, though, that Jinx can or wants to willfully ignore all societal implications of "undesirable hair." No—her flair for fashion is far too pervasive for her to allow something like a paltry fear of conventional hair-removal techniques to keep her cowering from eradicating something as monstrously disgusting as armpit hair. She wants the option to be able to wear tank tops, thank you, even if she usually doesn't because she sunburns like no tomorrow, but all the same, she likes having the _option_ of wearing what she likes without the threat of _fur_ exploding out from under her arms. At the moment, her favored method is hair removal cream, despite (or perhaps because of) Kid Flash's urges that all those compounds messing with her body's natural chemistry simply _can't_ be good for her. The treatment, though, stops with her underarms, because the sheer expense of constantly restocking her supply to accommodate hair-free legs is simply too ridiculous to fathom, what with her jobless state, not...stealing...,dwindling funds, wanting to _eat_ and have a roof over her head, and _mild_ shopping affliction.

'Cause she's totally over the whole "stealing" thing now.

Well. Mostly over it. It's kind of what Kid Flash would like to call a "work in progress," but all the same, actually legally buying her products has added quite a heavier stress on her scant savings, regardless of how often (or not) Jinx does purchase things.

In any case, her leg hair is light and fine enough not to be entirely obvious, but it's still obnoxiously pink enough that there's enough contrast with her (stupidly, disgustingly) dead grey skin to be nervous about, regardless of how much hair conditioner she sinks her legs under (bleach and other hair lightening products fall under the same category as shaving razors: "preventable idiocy").

In a fit of fury, Jinx has since declared that no one's going to be looking at her bare legs, anyway, as far as _she's_ concerned—she'll hex them through the wall before they can get within a five foot radius—and at any rate, leggings are fashionable, too. Leggings, not tights, because leggings are thick and opaque (not at all like the fake opaqueness rip-off tights like to claim) and come in much more exciting patterns and colors. Boots that reach farther up her leg compensate for the open-foot design of leggings, of which Jinx is infinitely grateful, especially when she remembers how she'd felt as if she was going to lose a shoe with every step when she'd worn tights.

Leggings, though, while curing one problem by encasing and hiding her legs, exacerbates another.

In. Grown. Hairs.

And they wouldn't really have been such a problem, but the time between now and when Jinx had first liberated herself from the Hive Five hasn't exactly been long enough for her to fully comprehend just what, exactly, to do with her life. It has just been a few paltry weeks, after all, and it is only now that the initial novelty of being free from their constant inanity and directing heists (because no one else would—or could, really) and of now having to find a way to feed herself and getting a non-leaking roof over her head has begun to wear off.

Long story short, Jinx has an excess of free time on her hands. Free time enough, that is, to find herself just lounging about in her newly-found apartment with not even a cheesy romance novel to distract herself with—free time enough to turn to dedicatedly picking out every single in-grown hair as her sole source for entertainment (well. Not so much entertainment as just an effort to avoid becoming stark, raving mad, and yeah, this is how low she's sunk, but she'll never admit that out loud). At first, it isn't even so bad. She only first throws the gears in motion when she's idly doing leg exercises in the leg-baring privacy of her water-leak-discolored bedroom and spots the little plastered-in curls more out of a need to keep her sharp mind occupied than anything else, but then that's when everything starts going downhill. Downhill real fast. Because just one little bored pick with a fingernail while she's doing her lifts eventually turns into something that captures her full attention, and a few isolated miniscules of ripped up skin soon multiplies into a patchwork of raw skin all over her legs.

Then the bleeding starts.

But at this point, Jinx is too far gone. She's become wholly engrossed in the mesmerizing task of freeing all of her many leg hairs that have fallen under the oppressive rule of constantly being smashed under her thick leggings, and she so absorbed in her mission that she doesn't even notice when Kid Flash first knocks, then yells, then loudly and nervously invites himself inside her apartment.

And so, when Kid Flash first finds her, all he can do is stare in marked horror at her peeling, bleeding legs, and Jinx doesn't even realize his presence until he's grabbed her bony shoulders and jabbering demands and questions and worries a lightspeed a minute, the embarrassing exposure of her panties visible thanks to her one bent leg pressed to her chest on his initial entry not even registering in his mind. Amid the resulting confusion (and increasing volume) of both of them shrieking at each other, the panicked bellow that ends all other discussion comes out of Kid Flash's mouth.

"_Don't shush me!_ **You're the one that looks like a diseased rhinoceros!**"

In the resulting stunned silence, the only sound that can be heard is their mutual labored breathing and the dull shrill of the crotchety old next door neighbor demanding they take their stupid lovers' quarrel out of earshot, thank you very much, young people these days.

Jinx is the first to recover (ha, take that, Kid Flash), and she takes the liberty to calmly punch him straight in the solar plexus so that she can properly stretch her legs out and examine her handiwork as he's on the floor and gasping like a fish on land.

The sight is admittedly not pretty. "Oh," breathes Jinx, because that's really all her brain can articulate at the moment. That, and _like a diseased rhinoceros_. But she's not about to say_ that_ out loud.

The moment she regains control over her limbs, she kicks—literally!—Kid Flash out, spouting some vague innuendo about males in a girl's bedroom before sighing, staring down at her (unattractive) ashen limbs mottled with raw and angry red. "Like a diseased rhinoceros," she mutters to herself. Like a stupid sick beast that, not knowing what else to do, ends up ramming itself around in a grove of trees, doing nothing to help either itself, its environment, or the others around that must utilize the shared environment to survive.

"Find me a job!" she hollers at him, knowing that he's probably wearing a bald patch in her cheap carpet with his manic pacing outside her door, before heading regretfully to the adjoined bathroom to properly disinfect and care for her legs.

(Because for someone so smart, sometimes she's really, really stupid.)

...

_End._


	4. Fairytale Princess

**Capricious****: Fairytale Princess**

_A/N: Takes place some time long after Jinx has become comfortable with the idea of being a "hero" and is generally partnering up with Kid Flash. This one's extra angsty to make up for the last ficlet._

_Disclaimer: I only own the poor puppy._

...

Once upon a time, she had still been human.

But once upon a time was a time long gone, and now all he can do is stare at her with the wide-eyed gaze of disgusted, terrified horror that even hardened criminals form at the very sight of her arrival to the scene.

"What?" she asks, casually, carelessly flicking some wayward tufts of bloodied fluffy fur off her draping black sleeves. "It's just a dog, right? And it was totally getting in the way, defending this worthless thing." A beat. "Or maybe it was defending its dinner?" She's overtaken with such genuine giggles at this thought that she can barely gesture steadily at the sticky, splattered leftovers of the kidnapper she's just crushed underneath an enormous branch cracked off from the body of a gargantuan oak tree. "Well," she continues between peals of laughter, "I guess neither of them have to worry about where to get their next meal now, huh?"

"Jinx," Kid Flash finally says, very quietly, as her laugh finally begins to peter out. "I need to make a stop at the Titans' Tower in Jump City. Can you come with me?" She's all doubled up in laughter again, and she easily tucks her arm in his, either not noticing or refusing to notice how he tenses.

"Seeing Robipoo again? Okay, but only if you insist, darling," she drawls, all the while shaking in mirth.

In the end, it takes the entire team to incapacitate her, and by the time they're able to do so, both the Tower and the team are left in shambles, bruised and battered and broken.

"It was the right thing to do," Robin manages through a steadily swelling lip, putting a hand on his long-time friend's dislocated shoulder as the reinforced transport vehicle pulls away, screaming Jinx in tow. Kid Flash draws away, slowly, slipping from the lax grip, and turns away from the receding muffled sounds of rage and towards the lopsided Tower. He can faintly hear the sounds of assent with Robin's statement as he passes the girls, and he wonders if perhaps Cyborg is the only one that can even begin to understand how he feels—like the knight that rescued the princess, only to turn her into a monstrosity to be locked back into a tower.

It's all his fault that things have turned out like this. His fault, his fault. And he is weak enough at this moment to entertain the thought that maybe, maybe, if he had only left her in peace with the Hive Five, she might've been saved from this fate.

"Can I crash here tonight?" he asks, slinking with a pronounced limp through the gaping entryway without waiting for an answer, unmindful of the sparking mechanisms. "I'm...tired." He can't make the run back to Keystone City in his condition, he knows—especially not with all the memories of _her_ around every corner—let alone make it up all the monstrous stairs of the Tower without the elevator (Jinx had taken care of _that_), so he just sort of totters a few steps before sinking to the debris-strewn ground and passing out.

It's only fitting for him to fully appreciate the carnage she has left behind, after all.

...

_End. But not the end for the Arkham asylum..._


	5. Insides

**Capricious:**** Insides**

_A/N: Set some time after Jinx has become "good." Nothing angsty today._

_Disclaimer: Don't own any characters._

* * *

It is storming.

Rather, it is storming and hailing and raining and there is an obscene quantity of _lightning_ and _thunder_ (far beyond the power of the two Titans of the same name) ripping through the sky. The wind is unrelenting and volatile and the day is all in all horrible and she loves it. She loves its crazy intensity, its frenzied unpredictability, its nonchalant destruction. This storm is beautiful in ways she cannot entirely articulate, and she longs to dance outside—to hell with societal constraints—to bang open the door and just dance outside in the pouring rain in reckless abandon. And she would, too, if not for _him_ holding her back from the door, keeping her from danger and excitement and living on the edge with his inane common sense and logic and reasoning. And while it takes her a while (because he is not the fastest boy alive for nothing) in the end she manages to sneak a hex through his defenses, and she is past him and home-free _shut up, shut up, I don't care about being a negative pole of misfortune and getting struck and struck and killed by lightning_; the storm is so, so beautiful, and it tempts her.

But he calls his friends, his allies, those cursed do-gooders from everywhere but here, and she is thwarted once again. So in the midst of all their wary eyes, she pretends to listen to him, to counsel herself with staying warm and dry and safe and with him—with them, he hastily corrects himself. But Jinx did not receive the world's best in evil education for nothing, no matter what side she may be standing on now, so it is easier than kicking over a bubble-headed garden gnome to act as if her thoughts were not hopelessly, invariably, undeniably with the rain, the hail, the raucous lightning and thunder.

So she sits demurely and dreams of when the next perfect storm might arrive, resting in the comfort that this time, she was closer than before, and that next time, she will be closer yet to breaking out into the storm. Because eventually, there will be a time when all of his reasoning and all of his friends will not be able to stop her.

So she sits.

But when that does happen, she knows he will only go out into the storm with her to run between the raindrops and to try and drag her back inside. She will be lonely without a like-minded companion to enjoy the storm with, she knows, but it will be so, _so_ worth it, to be out in the tearing wind and pounding rain and forget how much she does not quite _belong_.

And ultimately, he will just have to let her go on these temporary lapses of consciousness. He will stay warm and safe and worried inside, but he will just have to let her come back on her own to her self-mandated prison of society—to him (them)—after the storm drizzles away to weak rays of sunshine. He has to, or else her incomprehensible rolling energy of turmoil, the source—cause—of all her bad luck curses, will have no choice but to ruin her from the inside out.

* * *

_End._


	6. Her World

**Capricious:**** Her World**

_A/N: Continuation of "Jinx is insane and Kid Flash is struggling with it." More passive than the chapter Fairytale Princess. Man I get so confused when I'm not writing in present tense...this is bad. I hope to move on to more concrete situations in later chapters._

_Disclaimer: Don't own Jinx, or Kid Flash._

...

She had stopped drawing unicorns.

Rather, she had stopped drawing anything at all in her sketchbook given by the staff. Anything coherent, that is. Now, it was only circles. Circles all huddled right next to each other, pushing and shoving, invading pages and pages of promising white sheets; frantic incomplete loops, wide and wavering zen-like circles, intensely rounded circles that took a minimum of five retraces, tiny little itty bitty circles. And she never filled in her circles.

The only pens he'd ever seen her use were red, black, and blue pens (the color of suffering). He wasn't sure if that was her preference, or if perhaps the administration only saw such colors fit for paperwork and thus only stocked such pens. In any case, regardless of what color pen she'd use, he had found she'd work with the same pen until it ran out of ink; she'd even stayed her course when she'd accidentally snapped one in half with a spark of a hex, ink dribbling in fat, languid drops down her pale hand, pale fingers, pale page, pooling in her fingernails. And aside from her strange fidelity to pens, he'd noticed that she'd always cover an entire page with circles before she moved on to the next, and never doublesided her work. In fact—and this was a bit worrying and had resulted in extreme confrontations with the staff—she never liked to stop drawing circles till she completed a page. Some days, she would keep working till her fingers, hand, arm shook, working till even rotating her shoulder socket no longer made circles, till her grasping the pen into her other hand no longer kept it in her fingers. Those were the days Kid Flash liked to leave early.

And sometimes, when he'd look at those pages and pages of circles circles _circles_, he'd see—_things_. Bloody, heart-wrenching,_ horrible_ things, and he swears he can hear screams and wails pounding through his ears in a silent roar. But then he'd blink, and everything—all that suffering and pain and desperation—everything would all go back to being circles. Because that was all they were, all they had ever been in the first place. Circles. Just lines on a page.

It was preposterous to be afraid of _circles_.

But these days, when he'd dare look through her sketchbook, she'd smile more. It was a bit unsettling, actually, not having to worry about her raging and destroying property like in the Hive Five days, or even contentedly ignoring her awkward and embarrassed shuffling like in the days before—now. No, now she's all wide, toothy smiles when he pages through her etchings, and he'd never thought there would've ever been a day when he would fear seeing those more than anything else she'd ever thrown his way.

So for a while, he'd stay away. He told himself that crime had suddenly picked up in his city, even as he'd idle for hours at a time looking feverishly under every rock and around every corner. Things were busy for him, and it wasn't as if Jinx was going anywhere, right? It wasn't like he had an obligation to visit her every day.

That's what he'd told himself.

Eventually, though, he'd managed to convince—deceive—his consciousness into thinking that his uneasiness was due to the creepy environment (all white walls and floors and ceilings) and mental preconceptions (institutions were where the misfits of society went, after all). So, he began forcing time in his schedule to visit her again. He owed at least that much for her. He owed at least that much for her since he'd played such a major role in her institutionalization.

On one of those resulting visitation days, as he determinedly sat with her, awkward in the silence of psychotic bass pounding through her headphones and the placid scratching of her ballpoint pen, he began to accept the existence of the _things_. And after accepting their existence, he naturally began to attempt reasoning out the logic behind them (because there was really nothing else he _could_ do, not when she was so otherwise occupied).

At first, he'd thought the circles would always create a pitiable scene, displaying the twisted illness of the mind (soul? heart?), but no, that wasn't it; once the image of a beautiful desert night had superimposed over his vision of circles. No, Jinx wouldn't be solved by assuming something so conventional of the unconventional. So he took a different approach, evaluating the time before _now_, when he'd begun being able to see _her_ through all her murky uncertainties, and rationalized that perhaps she was visualizing some injustice in the world. Jinx had always been the sensitive type, no matter what sort of image she'd tried portraying, and really, it was always the sensitive types that spent a little too much time dwelling on all they couldn't do that ended up like how Jinx was now: dead. Or at least dead to the world. Which was ironic, really, considering taking on too much of the world's troubles was the reason why they would end up as they were, but no, that wasn't it either; he was sure he saw an adorable fluffy bunny leaping through her circles one time. Neither her powers nor Jinx herself had never been rational; why did he ever think her descent to madness would be? So in a desperation, he theorized that her circle-making habits correlated with her song choice for the day—mindless club, techno, beatnik poetry, screaming metal—but no, even such point-blank obviousness did not explain anything either, because once he'd seen her tranquilly adding to the image of the rotting remains of a tortured corpse even as the vibrato shrills of passionate opera resonated the air around her.

He couldn't understand her at all, and this knowledge made him uneasy.

When at last he couldn't stand the gnawing uncertainty any longer (no wonder she'd snapped; how she'd lasted so long in such suffocating uncertainty was beyond him), he'd asked her why she was so suddenly so fixed on drawing circles. She'd replied, impossibly naturally, "it's for you, of course," not even pausing in her creation of her flat circle world. If anything, this only worsened his anxiety (and perhaps, in the end, that was the only reason why she had even said that), but still, he continued visiting her. He couldn't stop. He couldn't've stopped even if he wanted to, because it wasn't even about societal obligations anymore—he was mesmerized by her, like a bird struck motionless by the sight of a snake's gaping maw.

So he kept visiting her.

And on one of his visits to her, he'd noticed that she'd managed to work through most of the sketchbook the staff had given her. There were really only a few more pages left, so the next day, he'd brought in a neatly plasticwrapped sketchbook and a pack of vibrant colored pens for her (pens other than red, black, or blue). She'd smiled when he'd set his gifts near her, flashing her gleaming teeth, but she made no move towards them and indeed continued in her patient construction of circles, her fingers remained clasped clawlike around a pen and the side of her hand already stained dark blue.

The next time he'd visited her, the sketchbook had remained on the floor where he'd left it, its plastic wrap still perfect, and she had since moved on to a fresh cheap sketchbook provided by the staff. The pens, though, were gone. Just—gone. He'd never see her use any of them. And eventually, as she'd continued drawing inkless imprints of circles with her long-dried pen because the staff hadn't come by to supply her with another one, he'd finally ventured a question about the pens he'd bought for her. She'd smiled, just like on the day he'd given her the pens. "Thanks for them. They were my favorite. But I broke them all, so they threw them away."

What he learned later was that after he'd left, she'd calmly removed the packaging from the pens, laid out the rainbow of ink, and waited for the staff to come by. It was good to check up on the mental health of the...higher-risk guests, one of the staff had muttered confidentially to him. There was only so much room cameras could show you about how a guest was doing, and individual confinement tended to exacerbate certain...defects. And since Jinx had never threatened any of the staff and was, indeed, one of the most placid and gracious of the institution's guests, none of them had exactly been prepared when she'd suddenly struck her fingers into the floor and hexed the rainbow of pens to abruptly fly towards the staff. None of the staff had been injured, of course, the staff hastily reassured him, and miraculously the pens had all flown just past each of the staff—not even grazing anyone!—but she had made a right mess of the door with all the exploded pens and they'd had to replace it soon after. Such outbursts aren't particularly unusual here—not having one at least once in a while is an anomaly— and perhaps she had just grown tired of the door (you know how irrational such guests are); all the same, though, the staff earnestly appealed, please refrain from giving her any more such items. We pride ourselves on keeping our institution safe for all those in this building, including staff, guests, and guests' visitors, and we certainly have enough ballpoint pens in our supply for her to draw to her heart's content.

So in the end, he was reduced to bringing her plasticwrapped sketchbooks, and she would graciously accept them as building blocks into the creation of the rectangular walls of her circular world.

...

_End._


	7. Into Society

**Capricious****: Into Society**

_A/N: The following is a compilation of what I hear on campus now that I'm a big girl now and in the incredibly cultured environment of college. Timeframe for Jinx: she's left the Hive Five, but is still mostly a free agent._

_Disclaimer: I only own the situation. The two students' words are their own._

* * *

"I'll have the Molten Chocolate Cake, please," Jinx said, finally, after thoroughly studying the extensive dessert list on the diner's menu. The waiter smiled, a tad nervously, and graciously thanked her for the order before sweeping away to the kitchen. She sighed and briefly rolled her eyes. So she was categorized as a punk hoodlum gangster out for trouble. She'd thought by now, after she'd ordered a meal and finished a meal perfectly normally and everything, that the waiter would have relaxed a little and realized she _wasn't_ going to go around spouting emoisms and shooting everyone up. Well. Whatever. She wasn't about to change her hairstyle and wardrobe (that would require money she didn't have), not when her eyes and skin and hair were never going to approach anything "normal" anyway. And she definitely wasn't going to stuff colored contacts in her eye sockets and waste money on skin bronzer and hair dye just to assuage the fears of this stupid city. She was what she was, she couldn't change her mannerisms or what she looked like. Take it or leave it.

As the waiter came back around with her deliciously warm dessert, two girls barreled through the front entrance, backpacks slung nonchalantly over tanned shoulders, exuberantly asserting their party of two to the hostess. _College students_, Jinx thought, rolling her eyes, and daintily shaved off a little chunk of chocolately goodness into her spoon. The two settled into a booth a few ways away from her, chattering up a storm as they waited for a waiter to take their order.

"Okay, so like, you know how I have this Asian guy as my TA for econ, right?" Girl A declared. "Ugh, oh my gosh, he is, like, soooo hard to understand! Like, he's always mumbling and he can't even spell things right when he's writing on the board."

"Wait, wait, what's your TA's name? 'Cause, like, I totally have this Asian guy for my TA too and he' s totally like that!" Girl B replied enthusiastically.

"Uhh I can't really remember, but it was like Fuwaykuh Me or something. I don't know. It's hard to remember their foreign names."

"No I totally understand! Like, is it like F-U-I-K-E—"

"—M-I? Yeah, I think that's what it is! It's what I put on my sheet anyway when we had that pop quiz during lecture. Like I don't even know. It's so dumb." Jinx briefly imagined Girl A gesturing the extent of the dumbness.

"Yeah, seriously, it's like, go back to China and eat some rice or something. Jeez. You'd think that they'd hire people that could actually, like, speak English, you know?" The waiter hurried over to their table and took their orders. There was a lull in their conversation and Jinx contentedly enjoyed the gooey chocolate center of her cake. In time, though, the waiter hurried back past her to the kitchen, and Girl A started back up.

"Anyway, like yeah, how hard can it be? There are sooo many people that can speak English. Like, why even hire this foreign guy that can't even speak friggin' English?"

"I _know_. Like, this is why we're in a recession, you know?" Girl B flipped a hand in a "what can you do" motion in Jinx's mind. "We keep outsourcing or whatever. We should just hire American people that can actually speak _English_. Like jeez. Seriously." Something clattered at their table—seemed like the water had come back with their drinks and food. It was still early; the lunch crowd hadn't arrived yet.

"Oh my gosh that totally reminds me! Okay okay, so I was sitting in the TA section one day, right? And I overheard this guy sitting a few rows behind me say—I don't know, it might've been his friend or something—'doesn't his name sound like "_fuck me_"?'. I like _died_ when I heard that." Jinx's jaw clenched.

"Wait wait. Fuwayke...oh my _gosh_ you are so right!" The image of a slack-jawed Girl B materialized. "That's _so_ funny! Oh my gosh I can't believe I didn't think of that! You need to, like, get that guy's number or something!"

"I _know_, right? Like come on!"

Jinx's eyes flashed pink for the briefest of moments, and the girls' raucous laughter abruptly peaked into horrified shrieks amid the squelching sound of erupting food. It wasn't nearly as satisfying as she'd thought it'd be—the girls had ordered mostly salad, how disappointing—but at least it would be less work for the custodial staff. The dressing, at least, had exploded nicely.

And in the pandemonium that followed, Jinx quietly finished the rest of her dessert and left the diner. The crumpled bills she'd left on the table probably covered what she'd eaten today.

* * *

_End._


End file.
